Stuff of interest to me for WordPress developers
Framework
Is Sandbox dead?
Aug 27th
I had really hoped that Sandbox would see new life when ownership of the domain and it’s assets changed hands (see Scott Wallick’s post on offering plaintxt.org for sale). The link to the posting on plaintxt.org no longer exists, apparently the new owner deleted the original post.
There hadn’t been any posts on plaintxt.org or sndbx.org in a long time. There was a small amount of traffic in the Sandbox Forum but nothing substantial. I really like the simplicity of the Sandbox theme and gone ahead and used it on a couple projects even though it hadn’t been updated in a while. I figured with new ownership, it was bound to start again at some point.
Maybe I was wrong? I don’t know. I have been thinking of revisiting my Soccer theme since after using it for the CASL Ambassadors over the summer, I found a few minor issues with it. As I thought about updating it I kept thinking I should switch to a framework actively being worked (e.g. the Carrington theme?). So I went back and took a look at the PlainTxt blog and what do you know? A post! A minor security update was added to the Sandbox theme back in July. Was development active again? Poking around it appears that no, not really. Scott Wallick had made the change not the new owner who ever that is. Other than a couple comments asking the same questions I was pondering (has development started again?)( there wasn’t anything else. Bummer.
Now what to do? Continue? Fork? Pack up and move on? Decisions, decisions …
Theme Frameworks
Feb 6th
I want to use a theme framework to develop a couple themes. Why do I want to do this? Because I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There are several to choose from or I could write my own. I really don’t want to write my own.
Frameworks
I am sure there are more but these are the ones I have looked at. I had pretty much settled on Sandbox as I found it easy to work with and there was some discussion a while ago about including it as part of WordPress. I was a bit concerned that it hadn’t been updated since last summer but thought "hey, maybe it is done”. So I started playing around with it for my LEGO Blog. What is there now is very much a work in progress. I got it working enough that I could see where I was going.
Then I saw this: http://www.plaintxt.org/2009/01/looking-for-a-wordpress-brand/
Uh-oh. What is the future of Sandbox? I posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list but the thread went wildly off track and it was never answered. The comments on the announcement indicate that it might end up as part of WordPress but other than that, I haven’t seen any other mention of it anywhere.
I am reluctant to invest more time in a Sandbox based theme until I know where it is headed. I guess I’ll go back and look at the others again. I really like the idea of child themes so I want to explore this some more before giving up.